I am a proponent of the “early warning” use of competitive intelligence. However, any early warning program requires an inclusive, rather than selective, definition of competitors and what constitutes potential competitors.

Let’s look at a recent event from the perspective of the health insurance market.

Would/could early warning pick that up? Almost certainly. Why? Because these transactions involved the 4 dominant players in the group health insurance market. Any/every health insurer should have been watching all 4 of these firms and should have been on top of the legal and financial drivers which might enable/hinder these transactions, probably without much additional research.

What about these two other recent events impacting the same market?

“CVS Health [owners of the pharmacy company] to Acquire Aetna; Combination to Provide Consumers with a Better Experience, Reduced Costs and Improved Access to Health Care Experts in Homes and Communities Across the Country”[2].

I doubt that any early warning mechanisms in this market picked these up, for any one or more of several reasons (disclosure, before coming to CI, I previously worked in the health insurance industry):

It is unlikely that most firms in this market have heavily invested in early warning activities because their regulatory structure establish high barriers to entry. Firms regard this as virtually eliminating the entry of new or expansion of existing competitors, at least without some notice from monitoring filings with state regulators.

People move relatively freely from one competitor firm to another, producing an underlying sense that “we sort of know what is probably going on”. That undermines the effort to advance early warning, at least by limiting its focus to the “usual suspects”.

The focus of the industry has been on monitoring the political and regulatory activities at the state and federal level, inducing and supporting a short-term vision of structure and marketing. Short-term stress does not work well with long-term early warning.

The same focus would preclude any early warning system from considering the likelihood that non-insurance firms could/would take steps that might fundamentally change the health insurance industry.

The CI focus in the industry is most often on new products and their marketing, technology acquisitions, and changes in relationships with brokers and agents. Did you see the concept of structural change or existential threat? I didn’t.

Lesson? Come to an early warning system with as few preconceptions as possible. Recall the analogy of the lookout at sea: the lookout surveys all directions (not just on either side), constantly (not only periodically), and for anything that could become a potential threat (not merely any anticipated and identified threat).